Lourdes (2009)
Directed by Jessica Hausner

Film Review

Jessica Hausner's third film after Lovely Rita (2001) and Hotel (2004) is a similarly polished and idiosyncratic work, one that is more than a veiled homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1954).  Like Dreyer, Hausner presents an ambiguous, uncritical view of faith and religion and prompts us to reflect on what miracles are and why they are so important to us. Adopting Dreyer's seldom emulated austere style of filmmaking, which includes using painfully long static takes and repetition of seemingly banal situations, Hausner gives her film a cold, near-documentary feel which prevents us from getting too close to the characters and making hasty judgements about them.  Lourdes is contemplative cinema at its most engaging, a witty and meaningful film that explores profound themes with an irresistible lightness of touch.

The Lourdes that Hausner shows us is a city of stark contradictions, a place where high-minded religious devotion and crass commercialism at its ugliest sit alongside one another with worrying ease.  Mass-produced plastic effigies of the Virgin Mary are on sale on every street corner, along with a plethora of equally distasteful tourist bait that lends modern Lourdes the depressing allure of a kitsch Catholic theme park.  The so-called pilgrims who pour into the town are an odd mix of sightseeing, tat-buying tourists and halo-wearing believers expecting to be cured of whatever chronic or minor disability they have been unjustly burdened with.  As in Buñuel's La Voie lactée (1969), an effusive little priest is on hand to dispense glib platitudes to anyone who seeks an interpretation of the mystical workings of the Divine, like a penny slot-machine wired to a mainframe computer in the Vatican.  Hausner's approach may be far less provocative and disrespectful than Buñuel's, but the humorous intent is there all the same, mischievousness undercurrents that occasionally erupt into a jolt of surreal comedy, of the carefree Jacques Tati variety.

The central irony of the film reflects the central irony of life in general, namely that the most virtuous and deserving are not always the ones who end up on the receiving end of the Almighty's beneficence.  How unfair it must seem that the recipient of the miracle is not a devout Catholic who made the journey to Lourdes with the sole aim of being cured, but a withdrawn multiple sclerosis sufferer (convincingly played by Sylvie Testud, well-chosen for the part on account of her ability to convey a wealth of feeling without dialogue) looking only to broaden her horizons and make new friends.  In her entourage of genuflexing believers, Christine is the one who least deserves to be healed by Divine powers (or a random, scientifically unexplained quirk of nature if your prefer).  The fact that she is healed makes her look like someone who has won the jackpot on the National Lottery without buying a ticket.  Yet it is precisely because she does not expect a miraculous recovery that it seems right the miracle should come her way.  The moral of this cogent little fable hardly needs to be spelled out - suffice it to say that it is delivered with finesse and a surfeit of good humour.  

The crowning irony comes when Christine ends up being voted 'The Best Pilgrim' by her po-faced admirers.  Those celebrating Christine's stroke of good fortune conveniently ignore the fact that her recovery was brought about by chance, not by prayer and a cosy visitation by the Holy Mother.  All that matters is she can now get about without the use of a wheelchair.  It is the X-Factor effect, the Lourdes concession to celebrity culture.   Of course, not everyone is happy with this turn of events, but fortunately the aforementioned effusive little priest is on hand to perform more theological back-somersaults to placate the indignant credulous. 

Hausner's morality tale has such an abundance of charm, such elegant simplicity, that no one, not even the most devout Catholic, is likely to be offended by the film.  Rather than being a blanket critique of faith or religion, Lourdes offers up a much more subtle attack on a kind of uncritical belief in the supernatural that demeans rather than strengthens the individual.  Looking for miracles can be as fruitless as chasing unicorns if you fail to have a true conception of what a miracle actually is.

Film Synopsis

Christine suffers from multiple sclerosis and has spent most of her life in a wheelchair.  Tired of her solitary existence, she decides to make a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where she hopes she will find new friends and give her life a renewed sense of purpose.  Here, the miracle she hardly dared to hope for occurs.  She wakes up one morning to find that she can walk.  This miraculous recovery immediately makes Christine an object of admiration and jealousy, but she is more preoccupied with one of the organisers of the tour who has taken an obvious interest in her...